Beautiful reflection that! It's a pity the thought lasted only two or three days after I had gone into my trade. I wanted my sake and rich food so that trouble and customers were an absolute prerequisite.
Someone would be evicted tomorrow. In one way or another, someone would have to move his belongings into the Japanese compound. A Japanese man desired Chinese citizenship in order to return to his family in Taiwan. A Japanese drafted to dive for salvage wanted to give written notice of illness—that was how eager he was to get home. Some Japanese wished to illegally convert the goods they had on hand into money, others to open street stalls. A Korean-born reporter came. A blind person came. A pregnant woman came. A Japanese merchant who promised to pay me anything I asked and a sick man hardly able to walk because of malnutrition, they came too. I undertook anything. I prepared documents audaciously. I wrote irresponsibly. All I cared about was getting my documents approved. Sometimes I chose expressions designed to move the heartstrings of officials in charge of us Japanese living in China. Sometimes I developed watertight arguments. I wrote grandiloquently. I wrote half-truths that favored my clients. I finally reached the point of writing barefaced lies. At the very least, however, what I did write was understood. That was why most of my documents got through. My customers came to offer their thanks. Before I realized it, I was gaining their confidence. Not only was I a popular transcriber. I began to be looked upon as a reliable guy!
My only thought was to get paid. I never felt I was working for the benefit of Japanese residents. Those that depended on me in this way I pitied. I found the world ridiculous in which a person as irresponsible, as incompetent as I, could still be useful. The world was too flimsy, too dissatisfying. Formerly, before coming to Shanghai and even later, I had studied hard, worked hard, thought hard. At that time not a soul had trusted me. After the end of the war I didn't study, didn't work, didn't think. But in people's eyes I was changing into a man of integrity, at least to the extent that I had never before been considered for the role. No longer did I have any ideals, any faith. I was merely breathing, and that, apparently, was what people expected of me. I fell into the habit of looking sober as a judge. No matter what the proposition, I wasn't surprised. That was the kind of person my customers were seeking advice from about their personal affairs. A man married to a Chinese woman wanted to know if he ought to get a divorce or not. A Japanese wife about to run off to her sweetheart just before her repatriation told me her scheme. Occasionally, therefore, I reached the position of the Catholic priest who lends an ear to confessions and vows.
One morning I was drinking some sake left over from the night before. I gulped down a cup. Though the wine was beginning to sour a little, I was in a hurry to get drunk. Then I intended to write a poem I had called "The Man Shot to Death." The execution of a German war criminal I had seen in a newsreel had made quite an impression on me... Shots. Inside the white smoke the upper part of the bound body jerked forward. With that it was over. It had really been simple. As plain as day. So truthful as to be intensely satisfying. In it was something beyond logic. It had pleased me immensely.
Upper torso in a forward fall—
Why?
Gravity's law.
As I was jotting down these expressions in bold strokes, my landlady called up to me that I had a visitor, a young lady who had come a few days before.
I put a padded robe over my wrinkled workclothes and went down. Young? Probably her, I said to myself, remembering one of my clients.
Her husband was an invalid, but the real estate company that owned their house had demanded they vacate in three days. There wasn't a thing she could do by herself, so she had asked me to write a petition to the authorities.
My visitors always waited inside the front door. The sunlight through the seven or eight sheets of glazed glass in the roof made the doorway brighter than my room. When I had first seen that woman in winter clothing standing in the pale light, a shudder had gone through me. What had impressed me was her tall, slim body, her white face, like some flower at evening, her attitude, shy in a lovely sort of way yet seductively coquettish. I had felt as if something I had forgotten over a long period of time had suddenly turned up, a fantasy I had once believed in when I hadn't lost my aim in life.
"I'll do it."
In an efficient businesslike way, I had learned the essentials from her and had gone upstairs and composed a beautiful piece of prose. I had handed her the document I was so proud of, and without smiling, I deliberately demanded twice my usual fee. My business was the writing of documents, and I had long ago become contemptuous of romantic sentimentality. I had given up any feelings of anxiety about matters not related to my trade.
"Is that enough?" she had said, taking some bills out of her patent leather bag and putting them down on the mats. "It's probably been very hard on you since you started doing this kind of work," she had said, her eyes large and friendly as she looked up at me standing there.
"I've often read your poems. My husband likes them too. He's always asking about you." It had seemed to me she was reminiscing.
"What's that?" I had said, embarrassed, as if the flow of blood in my body had suddenly reversed itself. Why, just as I was about to receive my fee, had she started talking about my earlier poems, those terrible sentimental pieces?
—Always asking about me, did she say? Listen to that! "Take this to the Board and have them sign it," I had said roughly, gathering up the money.
She had thanked me, and when her beautiful legs were no longer in view beyond the dark door, I had tramped up the narrow staircase. I was so excited I felt dizzy. I had even bruised my right ankle as I missed a step.
Luckily I was drunk when she came again. After all, wasn't she a young wife, and even after the war, with plenty of money, was she really in need of anything?
"Well?" I asked rudely. "Did it get through?"
"Thanks to you, they made an immediate inquiry. We don't have to leave."
Her red and white checked sweater caused her white face to look even more dazzling. "Someone gave these to me," she said, holding out a pack of imported cigarettes. There was no sign she intended to return.
"Are you free now? I'd like to talk something over with you."
"Well? What is it?"
"It's difficult to talk here."
"In my room then?"
I took the cigarettes, worth several times my fee, and went upstairs. What a beautiful, graceful animal she seemed as she sat near me in my small dark room with its walls barren except for an electric light and a gas meter. Instantly my wretched back room was filled with scent and warmth, with something like the radiance of women. I spread out a dirty blanket and had her sit at the same time I did. Again I poured some wine into my cup from the half-gallon bottle.
"You men are lucky you're able to drink. You can forget everything."
I felt oppressed each time she moved her lovely legs in their silk stockings. I swore at myself, resisting, getting malicious even.
"We go on living, putting up with the humiliation. We're miserable. It's almost impossible to talk about."
"You don't say," I said with deliberate sarcasm.
"All we have is pain and humiliation." Suddenly her expression changed. She looked down, crying, her shoulders shaking. It annoyed me, yet I found her weeping charming enough. She was so gentle, so luscious, I couldn't help feeling sympathetic. Still, I wasn't going to let it get the better of me. She wasn't the
